Published 1:00 am, Saturday, December 18, 2004

Chase DeCarlo, however, just stood center mat with both arms raised, fully aware of the historic moment he had just created.

It's hard to completely silence 1,500 screaming people, but the Hatter wrestlers accomplished that on Friday night. They did so by upsetting nationally ranked Mount Anthony 29-27, the top team in New England. It may be the biggest win in the Hatters' illustrious history.

DeCarlo was the hero for Danbury. Down 27-23 going into the final match of the meet, the senior pinned Mount Anthony's Shannon Steward to provide the six winning points.

"I take no credit for this win," DeCarlo said. "This was a full team effort for us tonight. We did what we needed to do from 103 pounds to 275 pounds. That's why we won tonight."

This is the first time in five tries that Danbury has defeated Mount Anthony. It's only the second time in 12 years that a team has ventured into Mount Anthony's gym and walked away a dual-meet winner.

"What does this mean for the program?," Tricarico asked. "It means that we should be the team that's nationally ranked. It means that we feel that we have a chance to win the New England tournament for the first time ever. This means that this is our best team ever."

It certainly may be the deepest team coach
Ricky Shook
has had. Danbury came into this season loaded with experience and talent. The Hatters showed it Friday night, rallying from an 18-6 deficit. They stormed back behind
Kyle Rodgers
(140 pounds),
Jeff Marra
(145),
Jeff Esposti
(152) and Tricarico (171). Rodgers, Esposti and Marra all won consecutive matches to close the gap to 18-17.

Mount Anthony's
Kainen Mattison
defeated
Will Esposito
at 160 pounds to stake the Patriots to a 21-17 advantage. With Mount Anthony's standing-room-only crowd screaming at the top of its lungs, Tricarico viciously pinned Nick DeLuca to give Danbury a 23-21 lead with two matches remaining.

The Hatters needed a win by
Joe LaDuca
at 189 to all but ensure a win. But LaDuca, leading the entire way, tired in the third period of his match with Mark Hall. Hall took advantage of LaDuca's fatigue and pinned him to give Mount Anthony a 27-23 advantage.

That opened the door for DeCarlo. But he stepped up on this night. He needed just 41 seconds to pin Steward.

"Chase is starting to grow up," Shook said. "He's growing into his body and he's maturing. We're expecting big things from him this season. This is just the beginning. I'm so proud of the kids. We've been trying to beat them for five years. We are a very deep team. I just hope that we stay healthy."

Two things may have turned the tide in Danbury's favor. The biggest was the performance of Mount Anthony's
Robert LaBrake
(130). He defeated Mark Madkour by technical fall. It was the way he did it that drew Danbury's ire. LaBrake went out of his way to show Madkour up.

"We were watching from the sidelines and it fired us up," Tricarico said.

Danbury was trailing at that point, and that gave them added incentive, even more so than the hostile environment.

Secondly, the Hatters had good losses. Even Madkour's loss was a good one because he didn't get pinned for six points. Mount Anthony's failure to rack up the points in the weight class where they were favored came back to hurt them at the end of the match.

"We made some mistakes," Mount Anthony coach
Scott Legacy
said. "We should've capitalized early on with some of our more experienced wrestlers, but we didn't. I'm not sure if the emotion of the crowd got them, but they were over-aggressive. We could've definitely used more pins. This was just a great match with two great clubs going at it. It could've gone either way."